MacNeice
would die just six years later at age fifty-five. He might be writing an elegy
for himself, for poetry and for the larger literary culture. “Books in
graveyards” recalls Gray’s “Elegy” and its “storied urn.” Traditionally, a book
carved into a gravestone signified the Book of Life, awaiting review by the Heavenly
Critic. Engines and epileptics “seize up,” frozen into inoperability. And ours
is the age of “other, less difficult, media.” At least since the decade of
MacNeice’s death, we’ve called our time post-literate – a happy new reality for
some (those who prefer their media “less difficult”), grievous for others (all
who live by the word).

MacNeice
then pays poetry and the written word a splendid compliment. When the world is
no longer “framed in words,” when the best eyes and ears of the past are no
longer consulted, when we presume to confront the world in all our arrogant
solitude, what remains? A weirdly
mutated world of “wingless birds.” Without words, grass is no longer “green”
but something less. In his 1935 essay “Poetry To-day” (Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice (ed. Alan Heuser,
Clarendon Press, 1987), MacNeice had already addressed posterity, saying it “affects
to put dead poets and movements in their place; to tell us their real
significance and cancel out their irrelevances.” Such presumption is, he says, “tidy
and saves thinking.” MacNeice rises to eloquent common sense:

“If
we do our duty by the present moment, posterity can look after itself. To try
to anticipate the future is to make the present past; whereas it should already
be on our conscience that we have made the past past. We fail to appreciate a
great poet like Horace because we don’t let him puzzle us.”

One
writer unseduced by “other, less difficult, media” is Bill Vallicella at The Maverick Philosopher. He impresses me as having a disciplined, attentive mind.
He sees things, makes connections and records them in plain prose. More than
five years ago, in a post titled “A Method of Study,” Bill proposed an antidote
to MacNeice’s grim vision of posterity:

“If
you read books of lasting value, you ought to study what you read, and if you
study, you ought to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself
to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of
studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the
good while rejecting the bad? The forming of the mind is the name of the
game.This won't occur from passive
reading, but only by an active engagement with the material.The best way to do this is by writing up your
own take on it.Here is where blogging
can be useful.Since blog posts are made
public, your self-respect will give you an incentive to work at saying
something intelligent.”